Group-invariant moments under tomographic projections
Abstract
Let be an unknown object, and suppose the observations are tomographic projections of randomly rotated copies of of the form , where is Haar-uniform in and is the projection onto an -dimensional subspace, so that . We prove that, whenever , the -th order moment of the projected data determines the full -th order Haar-orbit moment of , independently of the ambient dimension . We further provide an explicit algorithmic procedure for recovering the latter from the former. As a consequence, any identifiability result for the unprojected model based on -th order group-invariant moment extends directly to the tomographic setting at the same moment order. In particular, for , , and , our result recovers a classical result in the cryo-EM literature: the covariance of the 2D projection images determines the second order rotationally invariant moment of the underlying 3D object.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.08330,
title = {Group-invariant moments under tomographic projections},
author = {Amnon Balanov and Tamir Bendory and Dan Edidin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.08330},
year = {2026}
}